The name is absent

THE BASIS OF WHITTIER’S CRITICAL CREED: THE
BEAUTY OF THE COMMONPLACE AND

THE TRUTH OF STYLE

ALTHOUGH Whittier professed to scorn “the tricks of
ʃɪ art”¹ and evinced little interest in aesthetic theory as
such, his writing does bear a definite relationship to what he
thought to be the basis of beauty and art. His beliefs, con-
tradictory and vacillating in his youth, gradually matured
under the pressures of political and abolitionist work into a
doctrine of the beauty of the commonplace and the truth of
style, which served as the critical basis for his best genre
poetry and ballads. The full extent of his search for a critical
creed and its function in shaping his artistry has never been
fully examined.² This paper will attempt to highlight the
evolution of his mature critical beliefs and briefly indicate
their function as a valid measure for his poetic achievement.

A brief survey of Whittier’s formative years (to 1833) re-
veals three main influences which fashioned his critical con-
cepts and caused the lifelong struggle between the Iure of
external beauty and the “inner light” of the spirit: his Quaker
background, Burns’ poetry, and the English and American
Romantics. His Quaker training, strengthened by his Biblical
knowledge, stressed the necessity of individual striving for
perfection against the set rules of dogma; of putting into
action tire humanitarian doctrines of social equality; of trust-
ing in the inner spirit of God; and of viewing all phases of
life—cultural, political, and economic—from a spiritual as-
pect. Also his readings in the works of Penn, Chalkley, Bar-
clay, and Bunyan taught him to appreciate books which were
“shorn of all ornament, simple and direct . . . dead to self-
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